Manufacturers of discrete wire harness assemblies must usually arrange to provide an extensive inventory of components that require high labor content to assemble in order to produce acceptable finished products to their OEM customers. Labor-intensive tasks commonly include selecting and handling correct wires types and sizes, and selecting from a myriad of loose piece components such as connector housings, hardware, clips, terminals, all of from among large numbers of bulk supplies. Other tasks include pulling wire and routing groups of wires around pegs and other such layout fixtures to establish proper lengths for each wire of a product being manufactured, inserting wires into terminal and jacket crimping and forming machines, and snapping or inserting terminated wires into proper cavities of cable end connector housings, or arranging groups of wires cables onto insulation-displacement devices and mass-terminating these groups using an arbor press or some other high-force machine.
Often assembly fixtures are fitted to move on conveyor systems, and a work shift can include several different products to be made within the same work cell. Changeovers from one product to the next often require that fixtures such as for wire cutting or stripping, or for supplying and crimping terminals onto wire ends must be re-adjusted or re-configured. Peg fixtures for dressing wires to length must also be re-configured or removed from a work cell and replaced with fixtures configured for the next cable product to be manufactured.
Thus cable assembly work entails much dexterity, attention to details, fine finger work, and the ability to follow complex assembly and testing instructions, and to react correctly as these instructions are changed to follow various and flexible production schedules. Wire harness manufacturing entails an intense amount of complex and detailed work, all of which must be executed competently and correctly.
Thus opportunities exist and will continue to exist for reducing labor costs by simplifying tasks, providing machines that can execute sets of similar functions simultaneously, and machinery of fixtures which are easy to re-configure so that flexible manufacturing work cells may convert from one setup to the next with less time, less effort, and while minimizing the opportunity for manufacturing errors.